Richard Deschênes TRANSFERT

March 17 to April 29, 2012

For the past twenty years, the painter Richard Deschênes has been skilfully taking apart the phenomenon of perception and, in so doing, has brought viewers to consider the question of the process by which images are made, the role of memory and the psychology of cognition. What do we perceive? he reminds us. The object, the material, or only the simulacrum, the image of that object, that material? On this point, he remarks: "My painting is of much greater physical than psychic consequence".

The content of these works employs the microscopic and the macroscopic, the mineral and the organic, the abstract and the figurative, the multi-molecular animal and the atom. Some of these abstract or figurative forms recur, like matrices: repeated, copied, traced and transferred many times over, as if the role of memory was to transfer, copy, erase and select and then, at the cognition stage, to organise, structure and construct. The process of making these large-format paintings reveals traced, copied and masked drawings. Appearance, disappearance, memory, oblivion, selection. From this, we understand that our mental constructions strangely resemble hypotheses—much more than certainties—made out of images arranged according to our individual and collective memory.

Presentation by Richard Deschênes on Saturday, March 17, at 2pmOpening Launch on Saturday, March 17, at 3pm